As predicted, more Microsoft news from MIX10, and this is some big stuff: Internet Explorer 9. As we all know, Microsoft really let Internet Explorer rot away, allowing competitors to make much better browsers with better standards compliance and performance. With IE9, Microsoft is aiming to not just close that gap - but to overtake the competition. Update: Ars has an in-depth look at the platform preview.

but with Firefox 3.5.8 it runs quite smooth (55 fps with the zoom in activated, no matter how fast is the spinning)

The pic in the blog shows 60 fps and it is supposed to be GPU-accelerated. So 55 FPS under Linux looks quite good.

I just took a quick look of the code and it is just javascript scaling the pictures so this looks more a test of how fast the javascript machine and the render system can work together.

I'm wondering how Firefox achieved such good performance, my understanding is that 2D acceleration in Firefox is not yet implemented under Linux, in principle 2D acceleration is in the pipeline and this only for Windows.

My guess this is due only to javascript performance to render the whole scene before sending to the graphic subsystem.

Another interesting test, using Vmplayer to run Win XP 32 bits and Firefox 3.6 shows stills a good 40 fps. And for this one the rendering passes several layers between Windows, vmplayer and finally Xorg. IE8 shows only 3 fps and Chrome even less with 2 fps.

I wonder then what exactly are we looking on the 60 fps shown with IE9: purely GPU acceleration or just the improvement of their javascript subsystem?. Anyways, this is a very simplistic example but still interesting to see the degree of performance of the javascript engines to render an scene composed of few flying images.